Free Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Kings & Queens by Malcolm Day

castle Arthur was held, to blind and castrate the boy, but the deed was never done. Instead the chamberlain announced that the boy had died of a heart attack. But when John realised the chamberlain had been lying, he took matters into his own hands. It is said that after inviting the teenager to dinner, John fell into a drunken state and murdered the boy. The king then personally disposed of the body by hurling it into the River Seine.
Ban on church services
    This despicable act set the tone for the rest of John’s innings, which went from bad to worse. More and more of his empire was being eroded away in wars with France, and it would not be long before France and England became separate political entities.
    Given John’s irascible nature, it was perhaps inevitable that he would fall out with the Pope over the issue of who should be the next archbishop at Canterbury. The king’s excommunication was followed by a papal ‘interdict’ banning all church services in England except for burying the dead. No church bells rang in England for six years.
    MAGNA CARTA
    In May 1215 rebel barons captured London and forced King John, who had retreated to the White Tower, to make peace with France. Having cornered the king, they took the opportunity of making him agree to their terms, which would be enshrined in a charter known as Magna Carta, signed on a meadow at Runnymede in Surrey. The charter essentially safeguarded the privileges of the barons and the church. King John is said to have agreed without even reading the document, simply to buy his freedom.

Too Nice For His Own Good
Civilised Henry III loses touch
    H enry III was known to be a cultured monarch. He preferred the arts to war and led his nation into a golden age of church building in the Early Gothic style so popular in northern France. Having inherited a kingdom in disarray at the age of nine – his father John had lost nearly all the overseas possessions of the Angevin Empire; only Gascony and Perigord remained in English hands – Henry relied on having competent advisors to get his reign off to a good start. Fortunately they were, and the country united behind its promising young monarch.
Immigration problem
    Henry endeavoured to form useful political alliances with European leaders, seeing this to be the way to keeping the realm peaceful and happy. But what he did not anticipate was that his marriage to Eleanor of Provence in 1236, coupled with his own endearing charm, encouraged a swarm of foreigners to flood into the country. Relatives and friends of the new queen regarded England as the fashionable land of commercial opportunity now that the Holy Land no longer provided rich pickings for crusaders.
    But this mass immigration of French aristocrats did not go down well with Henry’s barons who felt their noses put out of joint. Their resentment reached a peak when the king made the eccentric decision to invade Sicily with the intention of giving the land, albeit with the Pope’s consent, to his ten-year-old second son, Edmund. When the venture turned into a fiasco, causing huge expense to the treasury, the barons were outraged.
Rule by parliament
    Exasperated, the English barons decided enough was enough and would put a stop to Henry’s fickle ideas. In 1258 the earl of Leicester and the king’s brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, led a committee of 24 barons to confront the king.
    However, their intention was not so much to coerce the king with force, but to persuade him with tact of the better course of government they could recommend. On arriving at Westminster Hall the barons left their swords outside, and while they professed loyalty to the king demanded a prerogative to make reforms to state affairs which, to be frank, were a mess.
    Together the barons governed the country for several years. But it was an uneasy arrangement, and culminated in Simon de Montfort doing battle with the king’s army in 1264 and capturing both Henry and his young warrior son